1. Track and manage port capacity
As colocation environments grow increasingly dense and complex, you need to accurately inventory and track individual physical port types residing on every device to make the most informed decisions to improve planning for new equipment and services and aid in maintaining and troubleshooting colocation infrastructure.
“A lot of times I’m in a meeting and there’s a project coming up and we’re going to deploy some new equipment and we want to know what we have for connectivity,” said Tom Wysocki, Data Center Manager, KPMG. “What I’m able to do is bring up a visual of that switch and very quickly I can highlight what’s connected and what’s not connected. So if we’re in a project and I know there’s going to be ten servers and I’m going to need two connections per server, I can see I’ve got plenty of ports available and even assign those out now to the network team or the project leader and say, ‘These are the ports we’ll be utilizing,’ so they can go ahead and start getting them configured. We can start pre-cabling ahead of time and labeling and really move ahead on that project.
